


That one time I kissed a girl

by Quente



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/M, Gayness, Gen, Heterosexuality, M/M, Many different kinds of love, Original Fiction, Shounen-ai
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-06
Updated: 2014-04-06
Packaged: 2018-01-18 11:07:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1426237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quente/pseuds/Quente
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kaji meets a girl in college and really hits it off with her. The only problem is, he's not straight. </p><p>  <i>“I think religion fills the soul’s hunger for love,” Isabel said.</i></p><p>  <i>At that moment, looking at her through the half-dark of the car, I felt something in my own soul click. She really <b>got</b> it, and followed me farther down the path of my questioning than so many people had; especially Joseph, who knew who he was with so much certainty that he had no room for questions.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	That one time I kissed a girl

My boyfriend and I were giving each other lazy, slow-as-molasses handjobs through our jeans when Isabel stepped into my room without knocking. This was the 90s, and people weren’t as out as they are now, but I’ve always been pretty shameless. I went after my boyfriend shamelessly too, even though his nice Jewish family probably threw salt at the door whenever I stepped out of their house.

I don’t know what compelled me to freak out and sit up and go after her. I sure as hell no longer had a hard on. I guess soulmates come in all shapes and sizes, and something in me knew why she’d turned and ran.

“What the hell are you doing?” Joseph asked as I rolled away, stumbling off my top bunk. He was still half-hard, and his lips were all bruised from where I’d been biting at them.

I buttoned my shirt. “She’s so innocent. What if I wrecked it? I have to go explain.”

“Get back --”

When I caught up to her she was in her dorm room a floor below, sitting on her bed looking miserable. When she looked up at me, her blue eyes were large in her small face, just like a cat’s. I went over to her and pushed my fingers through her hair, feeling protective as hell. She looked away.

“We were just cuddling.”

“You didn’t have to run after me to tell me that.”

I sat beside her and put my arm around her shoulder, tugging her against me. “I’m sorry, though. I know it’s different from what you’re used to.”

She leaned into my touch a little gingerly, but she smiled up at me the tiniest bit. “I should find someone to cuddle with too.”

Half a year later, that person was me. 

~

I met Isabel on the first day of her freshman orientation. She was short, slender with the soft body of someone who never thought of exercise, and had the largest blue eyes I’d ever seen. Her light hair was stick-straight and cut to her shoulders, and she gave the odd impression that she could see through everything.

“Hi, I’m Izzy! Are you new here too?”

I snorted. I’m short for a guy because of Asian blood, and I’m young-looking too. I pushed my hair away from my face and frowned. “I’m your upperclassman. My name is Thai so I don’t think you can pronounce it, but I go by ‘Kaji.’”

“Oh, you’re Thai? I’ve been reading about Buddhism lately, but I’m not sure I actually understand it…”

I hit it off with Isabel immediately. I spent college lost in questions related to my mixed-race identity, and was using my last year to take every religion and psychology class that I could find. Isabel and I ended up going to lunch that day, and together we talked for a long time about all of our questions about religions, and mythology, and the human need to invent them.

It turned out that Isabel’s parents were into New Age stuff like meditation and past lives and eating ‘clean.’ Before her family became New Age and spiritual, Isabel was of Jewish faith like so many of the people who went to my tri-state area school.

“My boyfriend’s Jewish,” I told her at lunch. “It’s always kinda interesting when he takes me to his family’s gatherings. Passover Seder is so long with so many rituals, it actually reminds me of Buddhism.”

“His family accepts you? As his boyfriend?”

“Ah -- kinda.” That was the thing about having a Jewish boyfriend. His father was the director of the Jewish Community Center in town, and the fact that his son had found not only a man but a non-Jewish man to date kind of affronted everyone. It was difficult to repopulate Zion with Jewish children and be with a Thai man at the same time, after all. “I’m not particularly welcome, but they’re ‘liberal’ enough to never totally push me away.”

Actually, their attitude toward me, after three years of dating, was beginning to bother me. Joseph kept us together, truth be told, because the second he started dating me he really figured himself out. There were no lingering questions inside of him about race or religion or the future or sexuality. Unlike me with my wandering military upbringing, he’d grown up in one place and knew who he was. 

Joseph also knew that he wanted me, and in the middle of the stretches of depression he was sometimes prone to, he told me he needed me forever.

Forever was a tough word for me at the end of college, and I wonder sometimes if that’s why I felt so restless that year.

“Do you want to come to my dad’s meditation session?” Isabel asked. “It’s kind of New-Wavey, but maybe you’d enjoy it?”

“Yeah, why not?”

~

The second I returned from lunch that day, Joseph showed up in my room. 

I wound an arm around the tall guy, tugging him flush. The amount that I have to crane my neck to kiss him offends me sometimes.

He was gentleman enough to bend his knees, and his fingers found the skin of the small of my back, tracing down the spine because he knew it turned me on. Joseph was a swimmer, and his naked body was lean. My sport during high school was to visit the Jewish Community Center pool when he was lifeguarding and try my best to get him hard while he stood around in his Speedos.

Joseph really, really wanted in my ass. The problem was, we were both virgins and he had a big dick. We tried a few times, and it hurt so badly and felt so uncomfortable that I told him never again. In our three years I’d become a master at sucking him off, to the point where he rarely pushed it. But sometimes, when I turned around and caught his eyes, I felt him _looking_. And when we spooned, his erection wouldn’t go away the second it touched my butt.

“Got some time? Where were you, anyway?”

“I met one of the little freshmen. They look so young! What happened to us? When did we get so old?”

It wasn’t just that, though. There was something about Isabel that reminded me of a little kid. Maybe it was her wide eyes, or maybe the way she seemed to soak in everything I said to her with no filter at all. She wasn’t jaded, she was wide open like everyone is before they hit puberty and immediately shut down their trust.

“It went by in a flash, didn’t it.” Joseph’s fingers were up under my shirt, now. My nipples are my weakness, and a second later his thumb was flicking one of them. “But you didn’t answer the important question. Got time?”

“MMh. I have time for this. I went to lunch with that freshman. We talked about religion; interesting person.”

“Oh? Should I be worried about him?”

“Nah, you don’t need to worry about _Isabel_. She looks so innocent that she reminds me of you, when I met you.”

“I’m still innocent, damnit.” 

“True.”

We got to it shortly after that. Joseph pushed me against my dorm room door and shoved down my pants. In no time, his mouth was warm around my balls while his hand coaxed my dick upright.

“Already?” I laughed. “You’re not even gonna kiss me first?” 

“Mmmh,” he responded, mouth full, and his expression was so hungry that I quit complaining. 

We were back at the dorms together for the first time in a month, and I was hungry for it too. I put my fingers into the short, soft locks of his dark hair and stared down. He always looked incongruously preppy during sex, as if a mouth like that should never be doing anything involving a dick.

It didn’t take me long, but it took the edge off.

“Let me between your thighs today,” he said, after I’d come all over his fist.

“Yeah.”

Lying above me on the rough carpet of the dorm room, his lips fastened to my neck and his dick headed between the tight space of my legs. He groaned into my ear, more so when I dug my fingers into the sensitive skin of his ass as it pushed against me again and again.

“I missed you so much, Kaji.”

“I missed you too, Joe.”

Mercifully, the pounding on the door happened after Joseph finished, and also after I’d rubbed the wet mark out of the carpet.

“Open up, Kaji. I need to do homework.”

My roommate for the past few years was the school valedictorian. I had the strongest suspicion that he was gay too, but he was currently dating a blond girl about as uptight as he was. Still out of breath, I pulled my shirt on and unlocked the door for him.

“Were you two doing it?” Anthony asked, point blank.

“We were unpacking Kaji’s stuff,” Joseph said, giving his best Nice Jewish Boy smile.

“Is that why your elbows are all red? Seriously, guys, don’t do that in the room, it grosses me out.”

“...So yeah, how was your summer?” I asked, stepping behind Anthony to give him a half hug in true bro fashion. He always melted for me, just enough to make living with him bearable.

Anthony gingerly returned the hug and shrugged. “I worked.” He also averted his eyes, and I wondered what was going on. “It was a little...ah, anyway. It was boring.”

“I should go unpack too,” Joseph said, edging his way out from under Anthony’s glare, looking sheepish.

I grabbed Joseph on his way out the door and tugged his head down to kiss me again. “We’ll catch up at dinner.”

“You guys and your PDA,” Anthony snorted. He was liberal but Catholic, and whenever I pushed the gay issue near him I could see the deep tectonic plates of his identity shift.

“Fuck off,” Joseph said good-naturedly, and headed out the door.

Years later, I think I can identify that this was the start of Anthony’s crush on him, but that’s a different story, and no longer mine to tell.

~

The meditation session at Isabel’s house was interesting.

Isabel’s mother Mary was a sweet-looking woman who claimed to have powers of insight where she could tap into an unidentified bank of spiritual knowledge and spit out predictions about the future. Isabel’s dad Hugh had a hawk-like face and was thin as a whip, and before he talked us through a meditation, he used a pendulum and chart to clear our auras. 

It was all new to me, but I was open to it. They spoke of aliens and teaching spirits, “earth changes” and the ending times. It all sounded apocalyptic in a born-again way, but the meditation was calming, and I felt it bring me down to a place beyond all of my questions and insecurities.

On the drive back, Isabel and I talked about it.

“I hadn’t heard about the aliens before,” she said, frowning. “They’ve been reading some books while I was away, and I haven’t really caught up mentally. I’m not sure what I feel about it yet.”

“Yeah, I can see how it would be tough to swallow. But honestly, it’s as believable as any other religion, to me.”

“Why’s that?”

“I grew up in two cultures, mom’s Thai culture and dad’s white American one. Dad is a scientist, and when I was young, he sat me down and explained that humans evolved before religion was invented, and told me that religion was a story that explained things just like science, but science you could at least attempt to replicate it. Then he handed me Joseph Campbell’s _Hero with a Thousand Faces_ …”

“Joseph Campbell? I’d like to read him too!”

Isabel’s excitement when we discussed mythology awoke something in me. Soon I was telling her all about my quest to square my mom’s religion with this scientific view of the world, and make sense of why religion was a human need beyond just the explanatory story that my dad described.

“I think religion fills the soul’s hunger for love,” Isabel said.

At that moment, looking at her through the half-dark of the car, I felt something in my own soul click. She really _got_ it, and she followed me farther down the path of my questioning than so many people had; especially Joseph, who knew who he was with such certainty that he had no room for questions.

I grinned at Isabel, glancing sideways, feeling overjoyed to be talking about my preoccupation to someone that understood; she smiled back, her eyes so blue that even in the darkness I could see their color reflected in the passing lights.

~

I have a thing for skinship. I touch people easily, and when I like someone, my arms get all huggy. Joseph was used to it. In fact, he kinda dug it. He used to say that it made him know that I wanted him and he was necessary to me. 

In an odd twist of fate (maybe it wasn’t odd, because proximity is sometimes everything), Joseph’s roommate Will began to take an interest in Isabel. Will was a cheerful guy, a smart, slightly round pre-med whose wall posters were of voluptuous women draped over cars. He pursued Isabel with a single-minded intensity, trapping me to ask all kinds of questions about her and sighing to me about the pretty blue of her eyes.

I couldn’t fault him there, her eyes were nice. 

One day in my dorm room, Isabel headed in and found me getting ready to go to class. “Hey, Kaji. Will asked me on a date. What do I do? I’m not sure I want to date him.”

“Oh yeah, he finally asked you? Are you going to turn him down?”

“Well.” Isabel hesitated, stepping closer to lean against me, tucking her arm around my waist. “I kind of have an issue with men, and touching, and … and kissing. I think it’s from my grandma, who always used to play a weird game where she’d try to catch my hand in her mouth and bite me if I wasn’t quick enough.”

That sounded intense and I didn’t know what to say for a moment. We were open and talked about all kinds of things, but so far not really sex. I wiggled my fingers into Isabel’s hair, quieting her a little as if petting a puppy. “You don’t have to touch or kiss or anything if you go on a date. It’s up to you how far you go.”

Isabel stared up at me, her eyes a little forlorn. “What would you do?”

“Um. I’m different from you in a lot of ways. I think that I grew up a little faster just because of who I am. But...You could give it a try? He seems to really like you. It’s never bad to try new things, and you can always say no.”

Besides, Will was persistent, and maybe I wanted to stop listening to him ask me about her so often.

“So you’re telling me to go out on a date with him?” 

Why did she look so sad? I gathered her more fully into my arms and gave her a squishy hug.

“He’s a good guy, and Joseph vouches for him. He won’t push you beyond what you want. If you feel like it, why not?”

~

I didn’t see Isabel for a few weeks after that. It was second semester of senior year, and I had the worst case of writer’s block for my senior thesis that I’d ever had. On top of that, it was Valentine’s Day, and Joseph sprang dinner on me, and something else.

He took me to dinner in town. It was expensive and nice, and he paid for it. I’d gotten him a gift of guitar strings earlier that day, which in retrospect was just a little thoughtless. But then, before we drove back to the dorm parking lot, he took a right-hand turn and headed down a dark road along the river.

I remember the music. It was part of what Joe loved to listen to, ethereal jazzy synth stuff. The song was _No Blue Thing_ , something that made me think of a melancholy orb of light bouncing along by itself. “Are we going to make out in a parking lot like we did in high school?” 

It was our fourth year together, after all. When we started together, we had to find dark roads and make out in our car backseats.

“Yeah,” Joseph said, and parked the car in a lot near the river park.

The industrial river looked almost as romantic as a college town’s river should, lit with reflections from the far-off pharmaceutical buildings across the bank.

The music changed to T-Bone Burnett’s _When the Night Falls_ , and we listened to his words in silence for a moment, staring at the glitter on the river.

_When the night falls, it falls on me_  
 _and when the day breaks I’m in pieces._  
 _When the night falls, it falls on me_  
 _and I’m so lonely…_

“Hey, you haven’t really been talking to me about grad school. You know I’m going down South for law school...but I don’t know what you’re doing,” Joseph said.

“I put in an application for a school in Boston, but I kind of fucked myself over when I chose an Asian language instead of French or German these past few years. I think I’m going into Communication Theory, but...none of it feels right, or like what I should be doing for the rest of my life. You know what you wanna do; I have no clue.”

“So...if you don’t know, why don’t you come South and move in with me?”

I rubbed my eyes with my hands, thinking about that. Moving in with my high school boyfriend during law school, while I was still feeling so lost…

“Joseph, let’s have sex.”

“Eh?”

“I don’t have answers for you right now so let’s just fuck.”

“Really? I get to be inside of you?” Joseph’s eyes kindled, and I thanked the deities that men are easily distracted.

“I want you.”

We got supplies from a convenience store and headed a hotel room in one of the anonymous inns off the highway that wound near our school. We both had the luck of decently middle-class parents, so a hundred bucks here or there wasn’t going to break our college bank accounts.

In the hotel room, I let Joseph pin me beneath his long, lean body. His kisses were urgent as we made out, and soon enough he pushed back my legs to begin the awkward process of working me open. I made him wear a latex glove covered so thickly in lubricant that it stained the hotel towel under my ass, and I still remember the pinch and burn and ache of his fingers inside me. His dick was hard and large against my thigh like a reminder of things to come. It was going to suck...it was going to feel amazing. 

Most of all it felt necessary, almost like closure.

Joseph didn’t finger me nearly enough, but when he pushed inside, I bore the tough ache until the burn turned into something much hotter. He kissed away the tears that formed in the corners of my eyes from the sting of it. It chafed, but after a moment our bodies finally clicked and it felt like he was jacking me off from the inside. I began to moan with him, and his expression was so incredibly fierce that after a while I came with him still inside me.

When the sun rose over the river he looked down at me, his eyes already sad.

“Joe, I --”

“No, I get it. It’s probably time.”

“I love you though.”

“I love you too. My first love. We were lucky.”

We cried together and held each other, when we left, he drove me to class before taking off somewhere. It struck me that I no longer had the right to know where he was or what he was up to, and my heart broke all over again.

~

Isabel came into my room a week later to find me huddled over my senior thesis (still), my childhood security blanket wrapped around my head like a turban, and Sinead O’Connor’s cover of _Nothing Compares 2 U_ on auto-repeat on the boom box.

“I need a hug,” I said, a little shakily.

“I do too.”

We ended up curled together in my bed. After such a long time without Joseph’s touch it felt strange to have a smaller body nestled against mine; I was used to being the smaller one.

“I heard,” she said.

“Yeah. Everyone’s talking about it.”

“Do you miss him?”

“So much.”

She was silent for a while, and slowly her little hands settled into my hair too, and she shifted to tuck my head against her shoulder. “Are you going to get back together with him?”

“No,” I drew a shaky breath, “As much as I miss him, the thought of freedom is actually...better? Twenty-one is too young to be with someone for the rest of my life.”

Isabel was silent for a little while. Then she said, “Do you mind trying something?”

“What’s that?”

“You know my problem with kissing? Will tried to kiss me, and I freaked out.”

“It wasn’t any good, eh? I’m sorry.”

“So...will you let me kiss you?”

I froze for a moment in my comfortable place against her sweet-smelling body, and then rolled to my back so that I could see her face a little more clearly.

“I’m still a guy, you know. Just like Will.”

“Yeah, I think I was doing it wrong. If you lie back and I kiss you, I think it would turn out better.”

I searched inside of myself and found that I wasn’t all that opposed to it. “Okay. If it helps you through something.” It was tough to come up with the right way to agree to it that felt honest. 

“Okay. I’ll kiss you.” Her eyes were downcast as she shifted to sit above me, hesitating. “Close your eyes first!”

I laughed, feeling all of my protectiveness and sympathy for her welling up inside of me. If she needed to heal herself with a kiss, I could do it. Better that it was with someone who cared about her than some random guy.

Then there was breath against my face and I cracked open my eyes just in time to see her with her eyes shut, and red, red cheeks, hair tucked behind her ears. She had the cutest serious expression on her face. Then our noses bumped, and she gave me the lightest, softest pressure of lip to lip that I’ve ever felt.

Afterwards she sat back, hugging her knees. “So how was it?”

“It was really cute,” I said, lying still, at a loss for any other description. “Did it make you feel better?”

Why was she so red? “Cute? I guess you’ve done a lot more, so that was nothing to you, huh?”

“Um...it was adorable?”

Isabel shoved me over and I laughed, I couldn’t help it, but I also caught her around the waist and pulled her against me again and held her there. “Does it help to be in control? You should ask whoever you’re with to let you do that to them, next time.”

“There won’t be a next time,” Isabel said in a grumpy voice, hiding her face from me.

“I hope there will be, but only with someone who lets you do what you did to me just then.”

“Did you hate it?”

“Aw. It was...really nice.”

“I hate you.”

It took a lot of tickling to make her smile again.

~

I left for college at midsummer. I didn’t know when Joseph left town to move to the South, but we exchanged cordial emails every now and again. I moved to Boston, still feeling lost, but with enough room to explore myself in a new town.

I faded out of touch with Isabel a lot more gradually. She wrote me emails quite a bit the first year, but by the time I had my Master’s Degree, she’d stopped. I never really wrote her back with any seriousness; my life swallowed me up, and I let her drift away.

Fifteen years later, she emailed me again.

I’m in a stable relationship now, and have been for about a decade. Isabel’s email to me was as cute as I remember her to be, and made me think of her with great fondness.

_I always had a thing for you, Kaji, but I don’t think you knew._

Isabel has a husband, but no children yet. I think they’re trying. I guess I should’ve known about her crush given all that we were to each other. Now, looking back, I wonder what we would’ve been to each other had I not been gay. 

Would we have curled up together during the long stretches of the night, holding each other close as we talked about religion and New Age philosophy, and the raw edges of the soul that needed them?

Would we have had children? 

I can guess, but I’ll never know.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is loosely autobiographical, and dedicated to all the real people who feature here with different names and genders.


End file.
